Implementation Intentions and action triggers: moving beyond ‘Well, make sure you do it next time’

A student has forgotten something, whether it be their homework, to bring back a form, to bring their charged up graphics calculator, whatever. The following conversation often goes something like this:

Teacher: ‘Where’s your calculator?’
Student: ‘I forgot it’
T: ‘You know that I’ve told you before to bring your calculator to every lesson, and how important it is, don’t you?’
S: ‘Yes’
T: ‘Ok, well, please make sure that you bring it next time’, ok
S: ‘Ok’.

Lo and behold, they’ve forgotten it next lesson.

I'm no veteran teacher, but this has happened to me a sufficient number of times that I now know it's an essentially pointless interaction.

So, how to improve?

In preparing for my podcast episode with Dylan Wiliam I read his fantastic Leadership for Teacher Learning, and was really struck by the idea of ‘Implementation Intentions’ and ‘action triggers’. Here’s the snippet from page 198/9 (he'd just been writing about Brenton Underwood's 1975 imagined rejection-from-an-academic-journal cycle)

I've just started with a new class and thought I'd take advantage of this temporal landmark (See Harry Fletcher-Wood's ‘secrets of timing in schools‘ for an explanation) to try out this whole ‘implementation and action trigger' idea.

This idea meshed well with some recent reflecting I'd been doing. I'd been thinking about how my partner and I deal with a situation when one of us is struggling with something or forgets to do something we had intended to. The discussion doesn't go ‘Well, just make sure you do it next time!', it's much more like ‘What happened/Why did things happen this way/What systems can we put in place so that we can do a better job next time?'

This also relates to Dylan Wiliam's emphases on seeing failures as ‘system failures' rather than the failures of individuals. Anyway, back to the implementation intentions and action triggers.

And so it was, in my first class back, instead of saying just ‘This is your homework, make sure you do it’ I said: the following (10 minutes before the end of class, rather than the usual 2 that I give it, I wanted to ensure there was adequate time to set the scene properly):

Please turn to a fresh page in your workbook. I want you to write down the following: ‘Homework: Chapter 1B, Q9, parts c, d, e. Bring back media release form. Paste handout in book’ (instructions continued…).

Now, underneath this, I want you to write ‘When:’ and write down when you’re going to complete the homework.

Walked around the class a bit, checking students were doing it…

Now I’ve just had a look at what people are writing and I saw people write things like ‘tonight’, and ‘Saturday afternoon’. This is great, but I’d like you to be even more specific, please write an exact time, 6pm tonight, or 1.23pm on Sunday.

Ok, now I’d like you to write ‘Where:’

(at this point, groans began to emerge from the class)

Think about where you’ll be , picture yourself there, it might be at your desk in your room, it might be at the kitchen table.

Note: Everything up till here was setting implementation intentions. Now for the action trigger…

And now finally, I want you to pull out your phone and set an alarm, and when that alarm goes off, you know it’ll be time for you to do your homework!

Despite how pedantic I was being, I hammed it up a bit, and they did find it entertaining. I’ll also felt that I think the way that I progressively revealed the task made the students more likely to comply, as it was like a bit of a joke how I kept on getting more specific.

Efficacy?

Early signs suggest that this approach is having some positive influence. So far 18 out of the 20 students in my Maths Methods class did their homework in the first week, with all of my Further Maths students completing theirs. These numbers are much better than last year (though it is the start of the year, and they are a different class, so too early to say anything conclusive yet).

A final surprise!

For one of the students who didn’t bring back their media release form I had a chat with her and asked them to set another alarm. She said to me ‘My last one went off in my Literacy class sir!’, I said ‘Ok, please set another one now then, and show me before the end of class’. A couple of minutes later I checked her alarm and it was set for 10:30am the next day, I asked her to double check it and she said it was all good. What???

The ensuing conversation revealed that she hadn’t grasped the fact that by ‘set an alarm’ I meant ‘set an alarm for a time that you’ll be home, and your parents will also be home, so that as soon as it goes off you can get the form out of your bag, get them to fill it out, then put it back in your bag.’ And so, I went further with the questioning ‘Who usually signs your forms?', ‘When are you usually home with them at the same time?', ‘Will that be the case tonight?', ‘Ok, please set an alarm for that time, and when it goes off, pull out your form, get them to sign it, then put it back into your bag'. For me this was a significant interaction because it represented a real departure from how I've dealt with these such situations in my teaching career to date.

To me this conversation demonstrated more than anything how, for students like this, a simple ‘Do your homework’ or ‘Bring your form back’ is wholly insufficient and instead I need to be supporting my students to develop the skills (let's call them implementation intentions and action triggers) in order to get on top of their school work, and other tasks in life more broadly.

I'll let you know if I manage to keep this up, and whether I manage to notice any particularly positive long term effects.